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Palestinians Want Israel Indicted
Thursday, July 25, 2002
(4:22 PM EAT)
The BBC

About 300,000 Palestinians took to the streets for the funerals of the 15 people killed in the strike -- many vowing to take revenge.



[ ... ]

The cycle of violence in the region continued on Thursday morning, when gunmen opened fire on a car near a Jewish settlement in the West Bank, killing one Israeli and seriously injuring another.



BBC
The Palestinian envoy to the United Nations has demanded that Israel be brought before the world's new criminal court for the killing of 15 people in an air strike on Gaza City.

Addressing the UN Security Council, Nasser al-Kidwa said it was the first war crime to have been committed since the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened on 1 July.

The court, which can be mandated by the Security Council to investigate war crimes, should seek to bring the perpetrators of Monday's attack to justice, he said.

Arab nations called the emergency session of the Security Council -- the UN's highest body -- to debate the Israeli strike, which caused the deaths of a leading militant and 14 civilians, nine of them children.

The session ended without the adoption of a draft resolution calling on Israel to stop its "military aggression" against the Palestinian people, but the occasion was nonetheless used by representatives of both Arab and Western countries to voice condemnation of the Israeli strike.
(More: BBC Online News Source)
2002 © The British Broadcasting Corporation.

Yeah, yeah, I know. The Hamas stating the really fascinating coincidence that the missile attack occurred at the same time they were “considering” putting a halt to their criminal activities is remarkable, in an expected sort of way. But then you come across something like this:

Israel's representative at the Security Council, Aaron Jacob, said his country was forced to carry out military actions because the Palestinian Authority was failing to "root out terrorism". He said he regretted the loss of innocent lives, and insisted that if the result of the raid had been known in advance, the army would never have carried out the operation.

So, Jacob cites ignorance of future events as his defense. I suppose that’ll work. How is a reasoning man to assume a chosen target, in this case an apartment complex in a private neighborhood, could ever possibly have families living in it?

Dan